The tight funnel of remote job applications

Sergio Pereira -

Hey,

I'm Sergio Pereira, and this is the Remote Work newsletter 👋

Last week I told you how to handle holidays in remote work. It's always a stressing topic, especially for those working remotely for US companies.

Today, I'll write about the job application funnel, and how tight it is in remote roles, which get lots of applicants.

You might recall when I told you that I applied to hundreds of jobs until I landed my first remote job. It was hard work, lots of applications, some interviews, and a few offers.

That's really what the job application funnel looks like. As in this slide from Session #4 of my Remote Jobs Braintrust course, it's a numbers game:

It's also helpful to think about it as an actual funnel with these 3 tiers. As I'm observing every day on my Slack community:

• Some people aren't applying to enough jobs to ever succeed.

• Some people are applying a lot, but not getting interviews booked.

• Some people are getting interviews, but failing at them.

Each of these situation is a bottleneck that would prevent one from landing a remote job. But each of these bottlenecks requires a different solution.

I've seen that the activity taking the most effort is the actual application part. Scrolling through job boards. Reading through job descriptions. Finding the relevant positions. Applying to each one. It's a lot of grunt repetitive work. And that's why I built the JobsCopilot.ai.

Check this testimonial that Sudo, a Software Engineer from India, sent me this week:

Jobs Copilot  found him ~300 relevant remote jobs for his skills and requirements, from scraping 400k+ companies career pages. After applying to those opportunities, Sudo got 40 interviews booked.

This is a clear case where the top of the job application funnel is sorted. A ~13% conversion from application to interview is above average. Now Sudo can focus on practising for interviews so he lands good offers on the table.

It's also a testament of my vision for Jobs Copilot. It does find opportunities you wouldn't find on job boards, several people are reporting that. 

And soon, with the Auto Apply feature rolling out, customers won't need to do neither the manual application work, nor using 3rd party tools to fill application forms.

These ~40 interviews would have been booked with minimal input from Sudo. And that's really the vision of "getting job interviews booked while you sleep". 

I'll be sending an email to all existing 332 customers of JobsCopilot.ai, with exclusive early access to the Premium plan and you'll be the first to try the Auto Apply functionality. Keep an eye on your email.

Thanks for reading this newsletter until the end. You can read all past editions here. Make sure to share it with your friends and colleagues so they can read it too.

If you're interested in sponsoring this newsletter, send me an email or DM.

Cheers,

Sergio Pereira, 
Startup CTO & Remote Work Lover